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There
was much excitement in the press and in the psychiatric research community recently as a flurry of papers was published, presenting the work of the PsychENCODE project. This
project, involving the work of many labs, aimed to deploy the powerful tools of
genomics to dissect the landscape of gene regulation in the human brain, with
the ultimate goal of revealing the molecular underpinnings of psychiatric
disease. Genome-wide
association studies (GWAS) have revealed hundreds of common genetic variants
that are statistically associated with increased risk of psychiatric disorders,
such as schizophrenia, ADHD, bipolar disorder, and, to a lesser extent, autism.
What they have not revealed is how
such variants increase risk of disease. The PsychENCODE project aimed to
generate a set of data that would allow researchers to answer that question. There
are a number of challenges in going from identification of an associated risk
variant to elucidation of its biological effects. First, the…